Taking Sides - Amnesiac vs. Kid A

I think these two are arguing about two differing performances, not recordings.

ding the money. it gets good again at the end too, blud.

'kid a' easy anyway. 'amnesiac' has its moments. am an uneasy radiohead fan. i mean, uneasy to BE one, not the other thing.

lol was in indie club at xmas, they played 'idiotheque'.

Kid A and Amnesiac and HTTT are all too loud and not dynamic enough, thus they will sound better live wgere you have more variation in volume and thus excitement. EIIRP is HUGELOUD and yet it's meant to be this delicate electronic whimsy thing.

I don't buy the idea that x is meant to be this/that/other = exact reproduction of live performance.

Optimistic is the worst offender here, they should have made more out of the big thuddy incessant drums that characterised the live version.

I liked Amnesiac best for a long time, and I still think it's great. The electronic stuff sounds the most convincing on that record, plus Pyramid Song, Life in a Glass House, etc.. I definitely listen to HttT more these days, though.

Kid A has great moments (EIIRP, National Anthem, Idioteque), but I rarely listen to it all the way through.

Hmmm. No. I mean, no such thing as "perfection" obviously, because it's subjective, but... oh bollocks to it, I have a car to buy.

Amnesiac on the other hand sounds like the whiny Floydy wankery that I normally associate Thom and chums with.

The first half of Kid A is pretty uneven - I don't particularly enjoy The National Anthem, Kid A, or Treefingers, and they seem totally ignorant of any electronic music that came before them. However, I think the sequence of songs starting with Optimistic is the best thing on either of these two albums.

Kid Amnesiac

I mean, all that bass and drums and brass... Can't get much more electronic than that.

Hmmmm.. I think I can see where you're going with this. I'd been a seriously rabid Warp fan for some time before Kid A came out and on hearing it I couldn't decide whether it was good that they'd gone down this path or whether they had created some kind of Blue Nun of electronic music. Treefingers works as a mood piece or just as basic ambient music but it doesn't really do very much and its attempt to ape SAWII just seems tokenistic.
Kid A sounds and the National Anthem also sound a little immature. It sounded like Thom had picked up on Windowlicker then bought the entire Warp catalogue and thought "I want to sound like this now" but not really known how to go about it.
How To Disappear Completely just hangs in the air quite pleasantly but Thom's self indulgence starts to bleed through.

The second half of the album is much better and tracks like Optimistic and Idiotheque are much more realised.

I think if I'd have been about 16/17 when Kid A came out I'd have been amazed with it in the same way I fell in love with Giant Steps for being an eclectic rock album. Sadly I'd already started reading ILM so there was no going back.

On Amnesiac, yes it has some very good tracks "You And Whose Army?", "Pyramid Song" and "Life In A Glasshouse" particularly. "Knives Out" sounds like a boring retread of "Karma Police" with a very shit video to boot. Never liked the album version of "Spinning Plates" and yeh the album seems to lose itself quite quickly on the second half, only being resolved with the last song.

If Kid A and Amnesiac had been released as a double album I'd say it was Radiohead at their most adventurous and that they'd made some kind of sprawling prog-epic up there with the White Album and Mellon Collie. With double albums you can get away with a few experiments. But somehow splitting them in two cheapens them and shows up the less succesful moments on the album. This is because if you've spent £13.99 on an eleven track rock album and four of those tracks are IDM experiments, ambient mood pieces and dubious filler then you're going to feel ripped off. If you buy a rock double album for £16.99 and it's abrim with new and exciting ideas from rock to electronica, brass bands, dixie horns, bells and whistles, you'd hail it as an epic.

I wish I had these albums on me now, they remind me of university.

Does that make sense? I'm not feeling too literate this morning.

Shame both years were shite though.

A double-album of both records would make no difference. One single album, with the best of both and all the filler trimmed off, would rule. (Like everyone else in the world I compiled my own one in like 2001).

xpost - dudes, we are already having a trance revival only four or five years on. Stop trying to impose systems thinking on all this.

I think that's down to super-retroism on the part of ILM. It's ten years since 1996 and so the ten-year anniversary of albums like If You're Feeling Sinister are being drawn attention to. If you read the 1996 thread there are just as many people hating on it as they are loving it. The rest of the world is not ready to start getting misty-eyed about the post-Britpop heyday as it's too recent in the minds of those who were there at the time and those who weren't there are too busy discovering their own music to take much notice. In another ten years time the mid nineties'll be really fashionable again and everyone'll want to look like Alex James.

i am buying my gatecrasher kid redux outfit today.

i think of RAZORLIGHT as a britpop revival band innit.

is electro big?

i have been wondering this elsewhere. rihanna convinced me maybe it is.

xpost

Electro
Electroclash
Electronic Synth-Pop
ElectroHouse???

Enrique, I think you discredit the kind of impact Electroclash did have, although you're right about it being a part of the 80s revival which is what I've also been saying. While Electroclash was only seen as a significant movement among the dance cogniscienti (and even they saw it as a fad before it had even begun), I think it had a much bigger impact on the mainstream in the long run.

Getting back to the Radiohead subject, I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival. Elsewhere you can compare the sound of the Spice Girls with Girls Aloud and the latter have a distinct electro flavour as opposed to the comparably polished sound of the Spice Girls.

A revival in the Electro sound is just reinforcing the trend that things happening roughly 20-25 years ago tend to get romanticised and revived in a mainstream way whereas stuff that came out 10-15 years ago is seen as embarassing and untrendy. This is not really news, it's just typical of what happens. The 90s were all about the 60s (Oasis, Britpop in general) and 70s; the 80s were all about the 50's (Shakin Stevens, The Stray Cats) and 60's (The Specials, The Jam)

I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival.

Despite pre-dating electroclash by a year or two? What nonsense.

I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival.

Despite pre-dating electroclash by a year or two and sounding sonically completely different? What nonsense.